Long Tail Keywords for PPC

So I have a local business pay per call campaign in the home improvement niche. I would love to break into adwords or Bing, but in this niche I know the competition spends huge amounts on PPC (the client i work with spends ~$15k/month and they aren't even consistently in the top spots).

I'd love some peoples' thoughts on whether in such a hyper-competitive PPC niche it's worth trying to go after long tail keywords. Does this approach even still work anymore?